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Bruce Lindsay receives the 2010 Fisher Lecture Award

December 13, 2010

Bruce Lindsay receives the 2010 Fisher Lecture Award

Bruce Lindsay, Willaman professor of statistics and head of the Department of Statistics at Penn State, has been honored as the recipient of the 2010 Fisher Lecture award, presented by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies and sponsored by the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the International Biometric Society, and the Statistical Society of Canada. Lindsay delivered the 2010 Fisher Lecture, "Likelihood: Efficiency and Deficiency — and the Special Role of Hidden Variables," in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Lindsay's statistical research includes likelihood-based statistical inferences, which are used widely in scientific data analyses. Lindsay also is recognized for methods he developed for working with mixture models, which are used when data are collected from a mixture of populations. His work in this area is recognized as a major contribution to the foundations of statistical theory. In addition, Lindsay develops statistical methods that are useful for research in other scientific disciplines; for example, he has constructed models and analyses that have been applied to biological data from genomic studies.

Lindsay has published numerous scientific papers, has contributed book reviews and proceeding articles to several publications, and has contributed entries to both the Encyclopedia of Statistics and the Encyclopedia of Biostatistics. He has presented invited talks at scientific meetings around the world and at universities across the United States and in Canada, Belgium, Germany, and Australia. In 1993, he was chosen to deliver 10 lectures as the principal speaker at a regional conference organized by the National Science Foundation Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences.

Among Lindsay's previous awards are a 1998 certificate of recognition from the Penn State chapter of the scientific research society, Sigma Xi, for outstanding support of students doing research. In 1997, he was co-winner of the Snedecor Award given by the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies for the best paper in biometrics published during 1995 and 1996. In 1996, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1990, he was honored with a Humboldt Senior Scientist Research Award.

Lindsay is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association. In 2002, he was chair of the National Science Foundation Workshop on the Future of Statistics, and was one of the co-editors of the resulting advisory report to the National Science Foundation. From 1995 to 1997, he served on the National Research Council Committee on Fish Stock Assessment Methods. Lindsay currently is serving on the advising committee for the Penn State Arboretum.

Lindsay received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Oregon in 1969. He did graduate studies at Yale University and served in the U.S. Coast Guard before earning a doctoral degree in biomathematics at the University of Washington in 1978. From 1978 to 1979, he spent one academic year at Imperial College of London, funded by an NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellowship. He joined the Penn State faculty in 1979 as an assistant professor of statistics, then was promoted to the position of associate professor in 1985, and to professor in 1987. He was named distinguished professor of statistics in 1992 and Willaman professor of statistics in 2004.